The Field Poll reports that for the first time in seven years more California voters believe the state is moving in the right direction (50 percent) than feel it is on the wrong track (41 percent). Those living in coastal California are much more like...

By Dan Walters One can read too much into questions and comments from appellate judges during oral arguments, but with that caveat, it appears that the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to erase the redrawing of congressional districts by independent...

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Columns

Dear Pope Francis, You may be infallible, but your scheduler? Not so much. The itinerary for your highly anticipated trip to the United States this September defies belief: You’re not coming to California. Holy Father; that’s like visiting Italy without going near Rome. The scheduling omission is glaring. Your top priorities dovetail with California’s most serious problems, and you are responsible for two California controversies that require your...

Columns

In the most contentious veto of his tenure, President Obama has rejected legislation that would have cleared the way for construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. For now, at least, completion of the 1,200-mile conduit bearing crude from Alberta’s oil sands remains on hold. What continues, however, is the debate raging around jobs the project was expected to create. Even before the bill reached his desk, Republicans were lining up to slam the president’s veto as a job...

By Mark Reynolds
|6 days ago

Columns

I’ve had the pleasure of working as an electrical engineer at Raytheon Co. for more than 15 years, and I have a message for young women considering their education and career paths: Please don’t forget about math and science. I work for Raytheon’s Space and Airborne Systems (SAS) business in El Segundo, and I want more women to realize that STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) career fields aren’t limited to men. As a country, we are...

By Leticia Aparicio Diaz
|6 days ago

Columns

As a criminologist, nothing troubles me more than people playing politics with the facts about crime and safety. Blame games and misleading accusations often prevent a productive, meaningful discussion of what causes crime and how we can prevent it. But that is just what has happened in California in recent years as the state implements reforms to reduce its prison and jail populations. Is it possible to reduce incarceration and crime rates? The scientific answer is that we can and we...

By James Austin
|6 days ago

Opinion

Columns

My sister, Elizabeth Martin, suffered excruciating pain during her final five long weeks on this earth, before she died of lung, liver and spinal cancer. Elizabeth understood that there was no curative treatment for her terminal disease. But her doctors assured her that palliative care would keep her comfortable. Tragically, her greatest fear of dying in pain came true. And there was nothing any of us could do for her. The morphine the doctors prescribed for her wouldn’t...

By Anita Freeman
|1 week ago

Opinion

Columns

As we eased our way into the spring semester with a research group meeting at the University of Southern California, one doctoral student divulged that she had reread all the Harry Potter books over the holiday break. The room buzzed with marveled gasps over the sheer indulgence of it. That’s just the thing; fandom is most often understood to live in the domain of the frivolous, the pleasurable, and the light-hearted. It’s thought to exist separately from all the serious work...

By Liana Gamber-Thompson and Neta Kligler-Vilenchik
|1 week ago

Columns

We just passed the 17th anniversary of the publication of our first daily column back in the last millennium, a couple of years before that big Y2K scare. We were chased into the job of writing a column every day by an editor we didn’t like. If we had liked her, our whole life might’ve ended up differently. Instead, we tramped into the office of one of the more important editors, one we liked, and told her we were quitting. “Why are you quitting?” she...

Columns

Trotting out black and brown stars to present awards after few were nominated, Sean Penn’s joke about director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s legal status and the least diverse list of nominations in more than a decade added up to a cringe-worthy Academy Awards that was only redeemed by the folks that Hollywood so often sidelines. Patricia Arquette’s plea for equal pay for women when accepting the Best Actress award for Boyhood did more than just...